Written By leoni arima on Sunday, May 1, 2011 | 7:42 PM

I've spent a lot of time making this new morph movie. The first one I did was pretty bad. Well, this time I'm learning the software and this one will have really clean transitions. It's also being created at 1024x768 and all images were reworked to expand the backgrounds to the same aspect ratio. Below is a crude animation of one of the many transitions (its jumpy and poor image quality. I chopped it into 15 frames and made the gif.) Below that is an image showing the software interface and what that particular sequence looks like in progress and at exactly 50% on the transition. This project is taking me far longer that I thought it would but I keep going back and improving things as I learn new tricks. Hopefully it will be worth the time spent when it's done. This is a very rough example but if you look at details like the eyes tracking, you can see that I'm being much more precise on this one.

Everyone keeps asking me to tell my secrets about my manipulated caricatures. Well, I really don't have any secrets I'm hiding but I thought I would give you a small sampling of part of my caricature process and practice method. Below is a 2-3 minute very quick, what I call a manipulated caricature sketch. I do dozens of these in a day for practice at times and I almost always make a 2 minute liquify sketch prior to doing a caricature to try and capture the basic morph that I want, keeping it very loose. When working on a caricature in Photoshop, I always have on my canvas, a small sketch which hopefully captured the essence of the person, a small version of the original image and the image I'm working on, all together so I don't lose track of the direction I'm going, likeness, proportions, etc. I am reducing my reliance on and use of liquify, but when I do use it, I bring all three images in together so I can see the whole picture.

Now, let me make a couple of things clear. I am not yet what I consider to be a caricature artist. I have no formal training. I don't claim to be an expert or in any way qualified to teach caricature. These are my methods (if you want to call it that), not necessarily the correct ones. If you want to learn the art of caricature, take lessons from a Master. Jason seiler offers lessons online and as soon as I have the money, my wacom and my Mac, I'm taking lessons from him. Can't wait!! Ok, that's a little peek into how I do what I do. I will release more information on my personal techniques along the way. Don't ask me when. Goodnight!